Car safety: consumer awareness

On the lead causes of death, after the many kinds of health issues and unintentional injuries. Car accident is a fairly high cause of death. Which place it takes on primary death causes, depends on your location.

Driving behavior (thus also human error)  causes most accidents. However you might be able to give yourself a better survival chance by buying a safer car. There are many New Car Assessment Programs (NCAP) to look at. Obviously the most relevant one, is the NCAP based near your location. However it never hurts to look at others either.

Car safety technology has been improving significantly. So most new cars perform much better than old cars. Just 10 years difference can mean a huge difference in safety. Despite some old ones looking more sturdy.

A video to get you thinking (50 years difference):

Most NCAP programs do not compare different size cars with each other. Too many variables to test for. However a bigger car has more mass and the consensus is that a bigger car usually wins in a collision.  The IIHS did do some interesting tests:

However when you compare a new small car versus a big old car, this might not be that simple:

So when buying a car, don’t forget to look at the safety ratings. Will it keep you alive during a crash? Not always, but it does help.

Links to NCAP sites:

Insurance Institute for Highway Safety; http://www.iihs.org/

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: http://www.safercar.gov/

European New Car Assessment Program: http://www.euroncap.com/

New Car Assessment Program for Southeast Asia: http://www.aseancap.org

Latin New Car Assessment Program: http://www.latinncap.com

Korean New Car Assessment Program: http://www.car.go.kr/

New Car Assessment Japan Safety Information Group: http://www.nasva.go.jp/mamoru/en/

Chinese New Car Assessment Program:  http://www.c-ncap.org/

Australasian New Car Assessment Program: http://www.ancap.com.au/